As a lot of you know I have started to mellow in my old age and have begun to put away video games in favour of board and card games.

This week sees the board gaming group I started moving to a bigger (and more expensive!) venue as numbers have really picked up. I have been surprised by how many people are interested in the hobby now. Being in a group has meant being able to try a wide variety of new, and old, board games that would otherwise be outside my price range.

I love me some board games. I’d love to try and create my own someday with a couple of friends.

At work, a few of us get together every week to play some games and it’s generally a lot of fun. This last week we played Ticket to Ride, which was more entertaining that it sounded (I find that to often be the case with board games).

Pandemic is a lot of fun, but can be fiendish to win at times.
Lords of Waterdeep is one I enjoy and it scales well from 2 - 5 players which not all games do.
7 Wonders is a big favourite of mine. Very easy game to get into, but it works with large numbers and the expansions have done great at bringing new things to the game. Not played the new expansion Babel which has a few different additions in the box.
Firefly should appeal to various people here. Takes a while to play, but with the expansion it works great. Without the Privateers expansion the game doesn’t have a lot of player interaction and I feel that adds a lot more to it.
Love Letter is a great little quick card game of bluff and guess work. There’s various variants out of it now including an Arkham Asylum Batman version.
For some reason I have been playing Cash and Guns recently which again with a like minded group can be fun. Works well with or without alcohol.

I do enjoy Ticket to Ride. I want to play some of the variants such as the Northern Europe one as curious as to how they feel to play.

I am torn between two events currently, one is at my LCS and seems a little poorly organised. The other is at Heffers bookshop in Cambridge and is being sold as a pretty major event, including an hourly prize giveaway. I’m going to pitch it at my group on Thursday and see if any of the regulars have a preference.

Is anyone planning anything for International Tabletop day on Saturday?

I didn’t even know there was such a thing. This Saturday I will be playing a tabletop naval wargame. No board, just metal miniatures, ruler, and protractor. Does that count?

I’ve been playing boardgames my whole life, never got into this videogame thing, but these days I rarely get the time. My only real gaming time is a Saturday afternoon and that’s almost all RPGs.

One game I still play a lot with Kathy (who doesn’t play RPGs) is a Lord of the Rings game that we’ve had for about 15 years. It’s a co-operative players-against-the-system sort of thing, and we played it for probably a couple of years before we finally cracked it and won. Now we win maybe one in three times. Except at Christmas I bought a new expansion for it and it’s incredibly tough. We have not yet beaten the expanded variant (I beat it once on my own, then realised I’d got some rules wrong), nor can we see any way that it’s possible. But then, we thought that about for the original for two years

Mark and I and our group have been playing semi-regular games of Risk Legacy over the last few months, and we got to open another envelope on Wednesday which changed the game significantly. It’s a lot of fun doing this!

Also, after 2 games of Risk we had a quick game of Shadowrun Crossfire where something unprecedented happened - we won handily!

Another 18th-century naval game at the weekend. Completely unexpected and embarrassing outcome for the French. Their 34 gun frigate ran aground in shallow water, meaning that the tiny 8 gun schooner they were chasing just sailed round the back of them, anchored, and spent the next 90 minutes pounding them relentlessly until French captain Picard (I know, I know) was forced to strike his colours. Possibly the biggest upset in naval history!

Captain Price on the schooner now has to worry about he’s going to put a prize crew on the frigate when he barely has enough men to crew his own ship.

I’ve played a similar game recently called Resistance. It works best with about six people - you’re divided into Loyalists and Resistance (who all know who each other are) and its a game of bluff and counter-bluff to see if you can guess who the resistance are, or mislead everyone else if you’re part of the resistance. I’d definitely recommend that for anyone who can get a group that size together.

Good old Cosmic Encounter and the more recent Dominion are still my favourites. Both play in bursts of 20-30 minutes for a game, and both share the feature that every game is different depending on the cards you choose. And both of these work with three players without losing too much.

The Dune discussion in another thread reminded me of a game I haven’t played for 20 years or more:

It’s a great game, and one where the flavour of the novel isn’t just captured in the imagary but permeates every aspect of the game mechanics. Consequently it’s a very faithful simulation even while being a fairly abstract one. If that makes sense.

In some ways, it’s too faithful, in that certain tactics become obvious and to deviate from them puts you at a disadvantage. For example, the synergy of an Atreides/Fremen alliance is a no-brainer (Atreides anticipates the spice, Fremen gets to it), and it’s a brave Fremen player who tries to ally with (for exampe) the Guild instead. But part of the fun was taking on the challenge of trying to win without following the book, so it did lend itself very well to repeated play.

One day I’ll get it out again and convince five other people they want to play it…

Interesting. And a very bizarre choice, as the world of Dune isn’t just a skin, it’s tightly built into the mechanics. Take away the storm, the spice, etc. and it’s not remotely the same game. Keep them, and it’s so obviously Dune that I would expect the Herbert estate to sue.